SELL Like Your Business DEPENDS on It!

Email me. Then sit back and PROFIT With Your Own AdjustableSALESDIAL! Reliably and Predictably Smooth Out and Ramp Up your TOP and BOTTOM lines. Watch my video. Learn how to turn YOUR #1 THREAT into an 'Ace Up Your Sleeve' to PREDICTABLY GROW YOUR SMB BUSINESS! Email me. Take me up on my 12-minute confidential action-packed business and sales diagnostic conversation. I promise to make it the best 12-minute business discussion you have all year!

Founder and president of Chapman & Associates (C&A), Mr. Chapman is a university educated, professionally trained, award winning sales professional. Holding sales and sales management positions at IBM, Oracle, and CA and with over 15 years of consultative sales successes handling multimillion dollar information and communication technology sales - CROSS-INDUSTRY - Mr. Chapman has observed and studied the best-of-the-best in today's automated, high performance sales and marketing best practices and he'll put these Fortune 500 strategies to work for youon an SMB budget.

Help your prospects find you! Get noticed - easier - and at precisely the right time. Make that perfect first impression, around-the-clock, across town and around the planet. Help your prospects find you. Generate qualified leads. Fill funnels and accelerate sales cycles. Replicate your #1 sales guy and have him knock down A MILLION DOORS and ring out a MILLION COLD CALLS! And have him love you for it! Sell => better, faster, cheaper. For superior sales results and unparalleled marketing accountability and ROI -> target the social and professional fabric of your customer's virtual world. Start selling! Contact Chapman & Associates.

MAKING IT EASY FOR YOU

FREE 12-minute intro - sit yourself down in front of your computer, shut your door, right now, and email me - Jeff Chapman (superchap at gmail) - for a 12-Minute phone conversation that will change your life for the better. Let me tell you why my hate for costly selling but love for automated sales and sales prospecting will change your future. No time to waste. Email me now. Simple. If you're interested in help, here's your chance. Make it happen.

Saturday, October 08, 2005

Why a Blog ?

So there's "yours truly" in front of a terrifically famous hotel during a recent sales conference. In fact, the hotel was actually the setting for a MasterCard commercial a few years back. You might remember ...

A young newlywed couple, on their honeymoon, in a convertible, a scenic wrong turn takes them through the parking lot of this very hotel. They look up and around in awe.
She says, "Can we afford to?"
His response, "Can we afford not to?"

Good commercial. It stuck. Beautiful hotel. You might remember. In terms of marketing, creating memorable media is good.

Anyway, enough about the memorable mastercard commercial, for now. Let's talk about the new ways of being memorable. WHY the Blog ? 3 basic reasons.

1) Research2) Fun3) Sales

Let's explore ...

1) RESEARCH

Quick question. How did you get here ?

Did you click on a link from a bio ? Was the link in a business card, attached to an email that was forwarded to you ? Could it have been a blogger.com search or a search engine search ? Maybe it was a link from someone else's blog or from an online article you were reading ? Possibly, the link showed up in your inbasket, as a paid advertisement, embedded in an industry related enewsletter that you subscribe to. Or was it more traditional, like through 'word-of-mouth' for example ?

The point ? How people like yourself end up here is interesting to us at C&A. Gaining an understanding of how the masses (one-by-one) navigate the web is an important part of what we do - professionally. Knowing the trends of popular navigation habits helps us serve our clients better.

Online Buzz marketing, for example. It's been around for a decade and remains one of today's most effective - not to mention FREE - ways of creating awareness and excitement about an idea - your company, your new service or product - again, FREE ! Buzz marketing is a concept that has been enabled and fueled by today's contemporary information and communication technologies and the tens of thousands *hudreds of thousands* of bloggers and even more blog readers. Are you having bloggers to 'guest posts' for you? It's responsible for great ideas spreading like viruses, at the speed of light, through social media including the old school 'blogosphere' for example. Just one cost effective approach to cross-channel reach that keeps on giving.

What's most interesting is that today's savviest business leaders leverage the blogosphere and other Buzz Marketing tactics to create a virtual hype machine that makes their ideas popular and puts them in the forefront of what's trending and that helps turn their companies from startup to $30 million hit - overnight. Want to know more, here is the Business2.0 article. Keen footwear is featured (and 3 others). A small team of seasoned footwear and marketing professionals start a company, take on the goliaths and win ! [Expired ? Send me an email, I'll forward you the article. A terrific read.]

As a result of our passion for promotion and sales innovation, it's our business to always be asking, learning, researching how people, just like you, navigate the Net. To that end, this blog serves as one form of research into the 'blogosphere' again, so that we can help our clients stay on top, and ahead of their competition.

2) FUN

Chronicling one's personal life (for some) is 'fun stuff'. Blogging, for tens of thousands of people across the world, is a contemporary 'public' form of chronicling - a life, an idea, a trip, you name it. It's like a living-breathing photo-journal and anyone can do it - again, FREE. For people like myself, it's a bit of an art form, a creative release, a way to keep friends and family up to date on personal developments, and a way to keep the collaborative communication juices flowing.

Similarly, for some, it's a fun way of posting and sharing professional opinions about new ideas, industry research and trends, relevant developments and even past accomplishments and memorable times spent with clients or work friends.

For me, it's both. Part of this blog represents some fun - both personal and professional.

So, there's both a personal and professional FUN side to a blogging effort. Finally, to answer the question "WHY a BLOG?", there's a direct sales functional component as well.

3) SALES

You can also think of this blog as an informal, interactive and searchable virtual 'shingle'. I'm a business person. One who has 'linked in' with a powerful network of executives, creatives, sales and business leaders and executives. I have personal access to technology specialists, sales copy writing specialists, VPs of all types Sales/Manufacturing/Marketing/Operations, C-Level Executives including CEOs of Fortune 500, NASDAQ-traded corporations. I can tap Solution Selling experts, Lead Generation entrepreneurs, and people from all kinds of different industries and verticals.

So, that means on behalf of C&A, I'm always selling - and that means creating awareness through smart advertising and promotion.

You get the idea. A blog can act as a 21st century way for prospects and paying customers, all over the world, to find you and learn more about what it is that you do. You're indexed and that makes you 'searchable' on the web. For more information, listen to IBM's leading edge thinker, John Patrick, discuss the relevance of 'Blogging' and 'podcasting' in this 21 minute 'podcast' conversation.

In our case, I use this blog as an informal destination for prospects and buyers so that they can learn that C&A is about marrying contemporary information and communication technologies with solution sales processes and marketing best practices to create high performance sales cultures that transform businesses and deliver repeatable reliable results. Using this blog, we are able to tell our prospects that we are a collective group of talented, international, new world collaborators, vigilant and on the constant look out for what works, what delivers results, what makes business sense.

A blog is a clean, searchable, unimposing, and subscribable way to share with the online public what you do. It's a form of the new social media available to any individual, any group, any company (did I say FREE ?!)

CONCLUSION

As a closing thought, here's an idea for you. If you have someone in your organization, a crafty story teller, a technology bigot, a captivating pundit, a good communicator and someone who has a passion for writing, you may want to encourage him/her to be your unofficial 'blogging' spokesperson. Invite him/her to start his/her own blog. Ask him/her to create a professional section. Then invite your best customers to read his/her weekly column. Blogging is a FREE (long-tail, gift that keeps giving) way to begin the BUZZ. Alternatively, consider contacting us. We'll be happy to help you to tap into the hype machine.

In closing, I hope you find value in what you uncover here. Please have a look around. You will find personal info, hobbies, family developments, travel and of course, on a professional level, postings on trends for high performance sales and marketing in a world of new media, new clients, and new consumers in a post television age. The aim is to inspire innovation.

Best of luck, enjoy the posts and if you have any questions on how you might leverage the internet or other sales and marketing innovations, drop us a line. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thank you in advance for visiting. Come back any time, and of course, I welcome your comments and feedback.

As much as some traditionalists might suggest that BLOGs are nothing more than a symptom of encephalogrossiosis [swollen head syndrome], blogging isn't just for the vain. Blogging is in 'full swing' and here to stay. The movement is hip ! The numbers are high. The trend in growing. And the amout of personal time people are investing into them is significant. Media giants have caught on. CNN is even 'on it'.

If you've ever watched 'The Situation Room' with Wolfe Blitzer, you know what I'm talking about. 'BLOG-Reporters' do nothing but track the instantaneous pulse of the planet. If you haven't seen the blog report, keep an eye out for it.

If you're "C" or "VP" level sales and/or marketing, take note. The BLOG is an example of a kevlar thread being woven into and augmenting traditional marketing and advertising programs. Blogs are permeating your consumer's virtual universe. And it pays to know which BLOGs your audiences are dialed in to. More on this later.

In terms of what you are reading here and now, the fact is, today's professionals are using this medium to MARKET themselves. This is especially true if selling and marketing is what you do. And why not ? How better to market and sell yourself ? A BLOG is knowledge worker's 'hip' way of hanging out a [virtual, dynamic] 'shingle'. It's indexed, searchable on the web, provides do-it-yourself dynamic editing (including updating via a cell phone), and offers an opportunity for feedback. It's a new secret weapon.

As complex and real-time as the world has become, for those in the know, sales and marketing is easier than ever ... thanks to the new secret weapons. Secret weapons ? What secret weapons ? The "contemporary information and communication technology" secret weapons.

In fact the biggest and most profitable brands of the world are moving millions of (additional) dollars each year to newer, more interactive forms of media to capture new markets and stay relevant in the minds of their current customers.

The nice thing about these secret weapons is you don't need to be Coke, GM or Disney to take advantage. But you will need a new outlook and a new breed of sales and marketing team. AND That's where Chapman & Associates (C&A) comes in. C&A is high performance Sales & Marketing for a post television age.

Sales and Marketing Strategies

We deliver (integrated) sales and marketing strategies geared to the elusive 18-34 year olds who last year spent more time on the internet than watching television. To be sure, this 18-34 year-old age range doesn't accurately describe the breadth of the demographic of the new world digital consumer. From a psychographic standpoint, you'll find people of all ages, from all socio-economic and cultural backgrounds spending more and more of the media-consuming time online.

C&A develops and deploys sales and marketing strategies for its clients that uniquely leverage contemporary information and communication technologies. These strategies are designed to transition their brands into the virtual universe of today's knowledge worker and digital consumer. Our clients quickly realize that this digital universe opens up an entirely different set capabilities, an entirely different value proposition, through an enabling world of 'interactive branding'.

As you learn about these capabilities, these secret weapons, you'll see that not only can sales and marketing work together, today's sophisticated knowledge worker - your decision maker and consumer - are increasingly expecting sales and marketing to work together.

You'll also see that sales and marketing in today's REAL TIME world is nothing more than a game. Unlike traditional sales and marketing, today's world of sales and marketing has a scoreboard. It's real. It performs in real-time. It's uber-accountable. There's NO financial interpretation. It's easily and instantly tracked. With the new secret weapons, it's pass or fail time every minute after sales-and-marketing minute.

Today's sales and marketing best practices deliver up-to-the-minute results and are available to see anytime, anywhere - and are even being sent (real-time) to show up on the VP's or CMO's Blackberry or SmartPhone for example - whenever he or she hits the button. Don't believe it ? Need some proof ? Want to see this in action ? Want some secret weapons of your own ? Would you like your own sales and marketing scoreboard to go with it ? Want to charge up your sales force and give them some fun at the same time ? This and more in the playbook for the new generation of leaders.